Quotes About Culture

Soon she would have to wake, tend the fire, serve the men, care for the younger children, and face the end of a childhood she had barely known. Soon she would become the property of a man other than her father, and on that day she would receive the traditional Hindu blessing—May you have eight sons.

the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg's day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year.

Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice. Sol's

the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg's day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments.

It's wonderful to preserve tradition, but a healthy organism evolves Ã¢â'¬Â¦ culturally and physically.

Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.

He wished he were home in Charleston, listening to the Dave Brubeck Quartet on the stereo and reading Bruce Catton.

Our shared vocabulary—our own language—will die with us. We are the treasure itself: fathoms deep, in the world we have made and made again.

Wer beruflich mit Musik zu tun hat, müsste dazu erzogen werden, Sinn dafür zu entwickeln, sich auch vielen anderen Wissensbereichen zuzuwenden, die nicht direkt mit Musik zu tun haben. Die technische Beherrschung eines Instruments, die für einen Berufsmusiker wesentlich ist, hat nur dann einen Sinn, wenn sie mit einem allgemeinen Erkenntnisprozess einhergeht, zu dem eine breite Basis von Wissen und Kultur gehören.

I may be oversimplifying, but it does seem to me that, as the saying goes, we are what we eat, and that's a cultural statement as well, which means the kinds of families that have been 'flourishing' in this society for a hundred and fifty years, especially in the white middle classes, have become what they have embraced: consumerism; militant self-interest; and wars to subdue 'natives,' obtain international power, and control various governments.

Unless you somehow have a foot outside of your culture, the culture will swallow you whole.

One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. They are energized and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together. This task involves many moments of high-candor feedback, uncomfortable truth-telling, when they confront the gap between where the group is, and where it ought to be.

La mente creativa es un don sagrado y la mente racional un sirviente fiel –dijo, en cierta ocasión, Albert Einstein–. Por ello resulta muy curioso que hayamos creado una sociedad que, olvidando el don, haya acabado honrando al sirviente.»

In Japan, I learned the hard way that the moment of exchanging business cards signals an important ritual. We Americans are prone to casually pocketing the card without looking, which there indicates disrespect. I was told you should take the card carefully, hold it in both hands, and study it for a while before putting it away in a special case

Si hay menos mal humor en las altas esferas, también lo habrá en el resto del escalafón.

Leaders set strategy; they motivate; they create a mission; they build a culture.

It's exciting to hear them talking about poetry and science and philosophy—about Shakespeare and Milton; Newton and Einstein and Freud; about Plato and Hegel and Kant, and all the other names that echo like great church bells in my mind.

Nothing in our minds is ever really gone. The operation had covered him over with a veneer of education and culture, but emotionally he was there—watching and waiting.

complain and share certain stories—for instance, the one that Mrs. Wilk eventually confided to my mother about how, yes, she and the other Polish girls of her town, Rzeszów, had been taught to hate the Jews, but they didn't know any better—and also would gossip about the pani, the rich neighbor ladies who did not share their meals with their cleaning ladies; after this time, during which the two women

to gawk, for the entire apartment had been turned into a private archive, a museum of an extinct culture, in which Feuer himself had assembled whatever fragments of Striy's lost Jewish life he could get his hands on: old prayer books, maps, yellowing documents, municipal surveys, photographs of people he knew

The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison.

It has happened that a species has tried to live in violation of the Law of Limited Competition. Or rather it has happened one time, in one human culture—ours. That's what our agricultural revolution is all about. That's the whole point of totalitarian agriculture: We hunt our competitors down, we destroy their food, and we deny them access to food. That's what makes it totalitarian.

If you go to Singapore or Amsterdam or Seoul or Buenos Aires or Islamabad or Johannesburg or Tampa or Istanbul or Kyoto, you'll find that the people differ wildly in the way they dress, in their marriage customs, in the holidays they observe, in their religious rituals, and so on, but they all expect the food to be under lock and key. It's all owned, and if you want some, you'll have to buy it.

I'm not an anthropology buff, but I've read enough of it to know that the Zuni don't think that their way is the way for everyone, and that the Navajo don't think their way is the way for everyone. Each of them has a way that works well for them .